The Awareness Center closed. We operated from April 30, 1999 - April 30, 2014. This site is being provided for educational & historical purposes.
We were the international Jewish Coalition Against Sexual Abuse/Assault (JCASA); and were dedicated to ending sexual violence in Jewish communities globally. We did our best to operate as the make a wish foundation for Jewish survivors of sex crimes. In the past we offered a clearinghouse of information, resources, support and advocacy.

Rabbi Saperstein -- Good afternoon. I am Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and I'm pleased to join you today to speak in support of the Prison Rape Reduction Act of 2002. This important legislation would address a profound violation of human rights whose shameful prevalence has been overlooked in this country for far too long.

First, let me commend Senators Kennedy and Sessions and Representatives Wolf and Scott for their passionate, bipartisan leadership on this issue. We could not ask for congressional champions more dedicated to upholding the basic values of human dignity. Their example should demonstrate to all Americans our shared capacity to transcend religious, ideological, and partisan differences and unite behind a common vision of fundamental decency on issues where core principles are at stake.

The scourge of prison rape is just such an issue: Studies show that nearly 25 percent of the more than two million individuals in federal and state prisons across the country will be the victims of some form of sexual assault or harassment during their period of incarceration. In a typical state prison, one in 10 prisoners will be the victim of a completed rape. Once so brutalized, victims are far more likely to be victims of repeated rape. These are staggering statistics that should by themselves arouse the moral outrage of all people of conscience.

The comprehensive Human Rights Watch report No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons reminds us, however, that these statistics represent traumatic incidents of violent abuse that have been perpetrated upon real people. The report contains information from more than 200 prisoners in 34 states, and notes that in addition to the often "unimaginably vicious and brutal" physical effects of sexual assault, prison rape victims also suffer serious and enduring psychological stress, manifesting itself through "nightmares, deep depression, shame, loss of self-esteem, self-hatred, and considering or attempting suicide. Some of them also describe a marked increase in anger and a tendency toward violence." And tragically, AIDS, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases devastate lives physically and emotionally. Sadly, too many prison officials turn their backs on the problem, or even worse, encourage it as a means of control.

All religious traditions teach that the ultimate judgment of a society depends on how it treats the most vulnerable of its inhabitants. Certainly, incarcerated individuals fit into this category. No matter what crime a person has committed, no one deserves to be brutally raped as a condition of his or her punishment. But for too many people in the American penal system, prison rape is merely par for the course.

We must not allow this terror to continue. The bill at issue today provides a responsible, measured approach to the problem, setting up mechanisms for the study, reporting, and prevention of prison rape. Most importantly, the legislation promises to bring to the forefront a tragic plague that is too often a punch line and too rarely a subject of genuine concern in our civic life.

The Prison Rape Reduction Act would direct the Justice Department to set up three programs to address the problem: one to collect and publish comprehensive information, one to serve as a clearinghouse for the reporting of sexual assaults in prison and to provide training and assistance to prison officials, and one to make grants to state and local programs aimed at preventing and punishing prison rape. Further, the bill would establish a national commission charged with setting standards for averting sexual misconduct in penal facilities and able to play a critical role in educating the American public on this crisis. As one who was honored to serve as the chair of a federal commission established by a unanimous act of Congress, I can testify to the potential of such commissions to be a vitally effective goad to executive and legislative officials and to the public conscience.

These reforms would, for the first time, signal a serious engagement with the problem by the federal government. Such an engagement is vital, because turning our back on prison rape would not only violate the Eighth Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment, it would also mean betraying our most fundamental moral values, which tell us unequivocally that if we can prevent another person from being viciously attacked, we must.

I'm here today to tell you that we can prevent prison rape; we should prevent prison rape; and we must prevent prison rape.

Because of the profound moral clarity of the issue, a remarkable coalition of conscience has come together in support of this legislation. Jewish, mainline Protestant, Evangelical, and Unitarian groups, civil rights, human rights, and criminal justice reform advocates, health care professionals and youth workers, liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between - we all believe that prison rape is wrong, and that we can, and must, do something about it.

Some of us work together frequently; others less so. For example, it is not so common that Reform Jews and conservative Evangelicals find common ground to work together, but when we do, you can be sure that the issue at stake is one that cuts to the heart of a principle so basic that no reasonable person can stand in the way of its genuine manifestation.

We have joined together in the past on issues of similarly essential principle. Our common concern for the world's poor brought us to the table to advocate international debt relief. Our common disgust at the most foul human rights violations drives our work to prevent international sex trafficking and to end slavery in the Sudan. Our common understanding of the ennobling power of religious belief guides our quest for religious freedom, and to end religious persecution both at home and around the world.

One of the Torah's most radical innovations was to put forward the notion that human beings are created b'tselem elohim - in the image of God. The use of divine terminology to describe the human state serves to raise up humankind, to proclaim the infinite worth and potential of each individual person.

The implications of such a concept are far-reaching and profound, imposing on individuals and societies the obligation never to degrade others, to recognize the potential in all for redemption, and to assist the most vulnerable.

That this includes the prisoner is clearly reflected in the Bible in two separate places, where it pronounces a prohibition on raping those captured in war (imprisonment for criminal activity was not known in the ancient Jewish world), both women (Deuteronomy 21:10-16) and men (Deuteronomy 23:16-17). Intrinsically, rape is regarded as a vile sin - under some circumstances, the Bible holds rape to be a civil wrong that requires payment of damages by the perpetrator as compensation for pain, suffering, shame, and blemish (Deut. 22:28-29); in others, rape is categorized as a capital offense (Deut.22:25).

We must recognize that to allow the epidemic of prison rape to continue unabated is to reject the spirit of the divine that connects us all. Therefore, I urge the members of this committee to join with Senators Kennedy and Sessions in supporting the Prison Rape Reduction Act.

Thank you for your time.

###

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism is the Washington office of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), whose 900 congregations across North America encompass 1.5 million Reform Jews, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis(CCAR) whose membership includes over 1800 Reform rabbis.

Monday, July 29, 2002

Avraham Ger was arrested on suspicion of raping five- and six-year-old girls and of sodomizing a thirteen-and-a-half-year-old boy. He was acquitted of the rape charges, but served 13 months in prison after being convicted of the sodomy charge. Ger was rearrested October, 2002 and accused of committing an indecent act against an underage girl, who also lives in the neighborhood.

Over the past few years, three pedophiles have been active in a small neighborhood of South Tel Aviv. How did it happen that so many children were systematically abused without anyone intervening?

There are no secrets in the small neighborhood. The apartments are crowded and the walls are thin. The stairwells are narrow and dark. Life takes place outside, in the yard, in the parking lots between the apartment buildings and mostly in the nearby park that is closed in by dense bushes. It was in that park, say social workers, that 30 of the neighborhood's children were sexually abused over the past four years.

Last week, a resident of the neighborhood, D., was indicted in Tel Aviv District Court. He is charged with committing sodomy and indecent acts on at least four children. The real number is probably higher. Ha'aretz reporter Roni Singer revealed last week that D. was a good friend of Oren Danan, also a neighborhood resident, who was accused two months ago of abducting an underage girl from the neighborhood, sexually assaulting her, trying to murder her and leaving her rolled up in a carpet. In the course of confessing to the charges against him, Danan said he knew Benny Sela well - referring to the "serial rapist" who was convicted in October, 2000 on 13 counts of rape. Sela lived not far from the neighborhood. Danan was not the first neighborhood resident to be charged with sexually assaulting minors. Three years ago, Avraham Ger, a 24-year-old man from the neighborhood, was arrested on suspicion of raping five- and six-year-old girls and of sodomizing a thirteen-and-a-half-year-old boy. He was acquitted of the rape charges, but served 13 months in prison after being convicted of the sodomy charge. Ger was rearrested last October and accused of committing an indecent act against an underage girl, who also lives in the neighborhood.

How did so many horrific events occur over such a lengthy period? Did no one in the small neighborhood know that so many children were being systematically abused by their neighbors? What are we to make of the conspiracy of silence that made this possible? And why, even now, with the police already in the picture, are so many residents still afraid to speak out?

A local store owner explains: "Everyone knew that all the Sodom and Gomorrah in the world was concentrated in this neighborhood. Everyone knew for years that there were pedophiles here and everyone kept quiet. Bveryone knew that Avi Ger was a nut case. He even worked for me at one time. Everyone knew about his inclinations, everyone knew about Oren Danan, and most of all everyone talked about D. But his family is violent, so people were afraid of him and no one had the courage to open his mouth. There is no law in this neighborhood and no police. People here are not the poorest, but they are the most thuggish and that is why, even though they knew there were pedophiles here, they kept quiet and kept it a secret."

The brave woman

It took years before one neighborhood resident, whom I will call "the brave woman," learned about the horrific acts D. had been perpetrating on her son from the time he was nine years old. If she hadn't decided to fight him relentlessly, it is possible that D. would still be walking about freely today. At least twice in the past he was caught by youngsters in the neighborhood in the act of sexually assaulting minors behind the bushes in the park. They hit him and chased him off, but it never occurred to them to involve the police.

When the brave woman's son told her what D. had done to him, she was "shattered, shocked and totally devastated." She decided to take her son to file a complaint with the police. To her astonishment, the court placed D. under house arrest in his parents' apartment, which is close to her home. Nevertheless, she decided not to give in. For some parents and children the story evoked harsh memories they had tried to forget. Because of the brave woman's initiative, other complaints were submitted against D., and eventually he was rearrested and indicted on four counts so far.

Even though it was thanks to her that the conspiracy of silence was broken, the brave woman is also regretful today. She, too, knew about D. and what he was doing years ago. When her son was 10, she heard that D. was pestering him, that he had made the boy take off his clothes and sit in his lap. Deeply agitated, the brave woman went to D.'s father and told him what his son had done. The two of them then went to the park and found D. The father hit him and D. promised never to do it again. D.'s father, who was questioned by the police, confirmed this episode.

"In my opinion," the brave woman says, "D.'s parents knew what he was doing all along and didn't even try to stop him. I definitely blame them and I am also afraid. I have gone through a lot in life and I am not a healthy woman. Since my son told me three weeks ago about D., I feel I'm falling apart. My husband and I and the boy just sat down and cried and cried and then we said to our son, `Now we are going to do something very hard, something that you need to be very brave for. We are going to go to the police and we will see to it that D. gets the punishment he deserves. It might be hard for you and people might talk, but you have nothing to be ashamed of, you are the good one and he is the monster, and you have to be proud that we are going to fight the monster.'

"That's what we said to the boy, but I have a huge family and I don't want them to know anything about what happened to him, because I am simply afraid of what they will do. I am afraid they will try to get revenge on D.'s family. But I am just falling apart. I also have a boy of three and a half. I bought him a plastic pistol, and what was the first thing he said? He said, `Do you know the first person I am going to shoot? The first person is D.'"

The denying woman

Many people knew what was going on but preferred to ignore the warning signs. Another woman who lives in the neighborhood, whom I will call "the denying woman," only worked up the courage to lodge a complaint to the police in the wake of the brave woman's actions. She first heard about what D. was doing from her daughter five years ago, when the girl was 10. She told her mother that D. was sexually abusing her and was putting out lit cigarettes on her hands. For reasons that are almost beyond comprehension, she decided to ignore it, condemning her daughter to more years of abuse.

"`Don't you have anything else to tell me? What nonsense you are talking' - that's what I said to her," the denying mother recalled this week. "I didn't believe it about him. I knew him very well. I know his mother. He is from a perfectly good family in my opinion and he was a nice boy, who I would meet in the park and have a laugh with. It's true I heard once he abused a six-year-old boy, but I met him in the park and asked him if what I was hearing about him was true and he denied it. `Come on, it's not me,' he said, and I believed him. That's why I didn't believe my daughter, either. You know, he was a boy who lacked for nothing at home, so why in the world would he want her at all? What could he possibly want from her? She wasn't one of those bombshell girls with bottoms like a bagel, she was as straight as a board, and I thought to myself, who could get turned on by something like that and why in the world would he start up with her in the first place?"

It was only when the brave mother told her about what D. had done to her son that the denying mother understood her daughter had in fact been sexually abused. "Suddenly there was this click. Suddenly I understood that the girl hadn't lied. On the spot, I called the police."

She wasn't the only one who didn't understand what was going on. None of the teachers in the various schools from which her daughter was expelled due to behavior problems (she was termed "hyperactive") tried to discover the source of the trembling she suffered from. None of them asked about the burns that regularly adorned her arms. Even her mother reacts with a blank smile when she is asked why she didn't bother to check about the burns, and then adds, "You know how kids are, and my daughter was getting hurt all the time. The school was the one that noticed that there was something wrong with the girl. Today I also see that her deterioration - and it was a very extreme and sudden deterioration - began right after she told me that D. abused her.

"Suddenly she started with the shaking, she stopped eating and she slept badly and had all kinds of symptoms. At school they said she had problems, and another girl once told me that my daughter has problems, but it sounded like nonsense then. There was no way that I connected it with what she told me about D., which I had forgotten about, because it sounded like nonsense. I guess I didn't want to believe what I didn't want to believe. I thought it was all from hyperactivity, so I gave her more Ritalin and I went to see psychiatrists. One psychiatrist even said the girl should be removed from her home, but what mother would agree to that? Luckily, another psychiatrist said, `No, that's just the way the girl was born and you have to give her more medicine.' So I gave her more medicine and I thought everything would work out in the end."

The family's economic problems are plain to see. "You can see the way the house looks," the denying mother says. "That's why I was always happy that the children like to play in the park. Even now I am not afraid of anything. Smaller children than mine are playing downstairs and I know nothing will happen to them because they are in a group. You only get scared when they are alone, and that was the trouble with the girl; she was always alone, because from an early age she was an outcast. Probably because of that, it was easier for D. to get to her."

She is convinced the relations with her daughter will be much improved from now on. "She hardly leaves my side now, she loves me terribly," the mother says. At these words, the daughter, a beautiful, very thin girl, who has been sitting with her mother for the duration of the interview, gets up and stalks out of the room. But that doesn't deter the mother. "The event brought us very close," she says, adding that her daughter's social situation is also much better now. "She was always an outcast, but now, after she went to the police, the children are calling her from downstairs for the first time in her life to come and play."

The girl

Abruptly, the conversation takes another surprising twist. The mother says she hopes the episode will be a springboard for fame and glory for her daughter. "My daughter wants to be a model. The truth is, I agreed to the interview and I would like the girl to be photographed, because maybe that way some photographer will discover her and make her a model. You know, she's really gorgeous now. I'll call her in right away and you have to see what beautiful hands she has. She was just born to be a model."

The girl comes back into the room. "Can you arrange a `big sister' for me?" she asks. "That's what I'd like. And also to get revenge on D. to the death. I have already learned how to fight and how to resist."

Asked how she felt when her mother didn't believe her story, the girl replies, "Hurt and angry and that there was no one I could trust. My conclusion is that, if something like that happens, you must absolutely not tell anyone before you tell the police. First tell the police and only then tell your parents, because you can't trust your parents. Whenever something happens now, the first thing I do is pick up the phone to Nir [Superintendent Nir Sinai, head of the juvenile department in the relevant police district]. For example, I told her that a few days after we complained to the police, D.'s mother grabbed me on the street and said she would kill me."

This comes as a complete surprise to the mother. "You never told me that," she says, "you only said she made signs as though to slaughter you."

"I told you and I told Nir," the girl says, "but you never understand anything."

Even after hearing this, the mother insists that D.'s mother is "just fine. Why should I be angry with her? Is it her fault that her son is like that? If my daughter was a thief, would it be my fault? Each to themselves. I blame D.'s parents a little - not, heaven forbid, for his behavior and for what he did to my daughter - but because they had a problem and they didn't do anything about it. I think if they saw that their boy had a problem, they should have done everything to get him help, the way I helped my daughter. I didn't have money for food, but I took her to psychiatrists and I got her private lessons. That is what being parents means. I took responsibility. Parents have to listen to their child's problems and treat them. That is what D.'s parents should have done and what I did."

"How do you explain the fact that you didn't want to hear anything about my problems and about what D. was doing to me?" the daughter asks, to which the mother replies coolly, "Maybe I was also wrong. But then you weren't such a bombshell and the whole thing didn't sound logical. I know I did wrong and my husband is also very angry with me. All the time he asks me, `Why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you tell me what she said?'"

The daughter says she felt a little better after lodging the complaint. "It was a relief that people believed me and that they are going to put D. in jail and that I won't have to be afraid anymore. But I am also a little ashamed, because the children here are making fun of me a little and also of the other children that D. raped, and also of the others that didn't complain to the police but everyone knows who they are."

The frightened woman

The rumor that D. had been arrested after complaints against him were filed with the police had the effect of buttressing the courage of another boy whom D. abused. A volunteer who works with teenagers in the neighborhood heard, like many of the residents, that the boy had been victimized by D. He persuaded the boy to tell his teacher what had happened. He did so and the teacher reported the event to the principal, who called the boy's mother and told her her son had been raped.

The volunteer and the brave woman picked the boy up after school and went with him to the police to lodge a complaint. However, the boy's mother was furious when she heard her son had been to the police. "D. didn't pester him much and there is no reason to make a big deal out of it. My boy doesn't need any help or any treatment. He is perfectly fine and nothing happened."

What do you mean, nothing happened? He was raped, wasn't he?

"Yes, but D. didn't rape him too many times, and in the meantime we don't live in the neighborhood anymore. Before that, D.'s parents lived across from us. They are actually very nice people."

Did they call you to ask you to forgive them?

"No. Why should they ask me to forgive them? Besides, now, thank God, we moved to another neighborhood. The principal told me the boy should get help, but he's wrong, everything is all right, the boy is fine and I want to know as little as possible about these things, and that is what I told him, too. The less you talk, the better, I said. My husband doesn't want people to know anything about it, either."

The social worker

Varda Horesh, a social worker by training and the coordinator of the child and family division in the eastern section of the Social Services Administration in the Tel Aviv Municipality, is convinced there are more sex offenders in the neighborhood. "I counted five pedophiles in the neighborhood in the past four years," she says. "That is because there are also pedophiles who have been released from prison and have returned to the area," she explains.

Who, for example?

"Here's a challenge for you: Ask the Prisons Service which pedophiles from that neighborhood are out of jail and are living there again. Let's see if you get an answer."

The Prisons Service spokesman did not return a call about the subject.

Horesh also says she is convinced the number of pedophiles in this particular neighborhood is no greater than in any other neighborhood. "In better-off neighborhoods, the subject is kept better hidden," she says. "There is actually greater exposure of the subject in poorer sections." Still, she concedes, "The socio-economic situation in a neighborhood has a certain influence. Situations of economic distress and a high concentration of poor, single-parent families constitute a hothouse for the growth of social pathologies and perhaps also explain the particular type of indifference that exists in the neighborhood."

She notes that "The large number of children who fell victim to sexual assault and abuse had far less an effect on the frame of mind in the neighborhood than we hoped would be the case. After the acts of Oren Danan were reported, we expected people in the neighborhood to snap out of their complacency and start to be aware of what is going on, of what is happening to their children. We even conducted a survey in the neighborhood to examine whether the Oren Danan affair was generating a furor and we were very concerned when we discovered that people were reacting indifferently. In subjects like this, the mechanisms of denial and concealment work at full steam and it is not characteristic only of people of a certain type. The same mechanisms operate to a degree even on professional people, even on me."

So shouldn't you approach the children and offer help?

"When we have information, we do that. But in the current state of affairs, in which a social worker has at least 140 files and sometimes 300, it is very difficult for us to make house calls other than for specific purposes. Even then, if we find out that there is a child in the house who has behavioral or psychological problems, we don't necessarily conclude immediately that he has experienced sexual abuse. Behavioral problems can be due to the relations between the parents, to social pressures, or to economic distress. In the existing state of affairs, if we do not have prior information, there is no way we can initiate an attempt to locate children who have undergone sexual abuse. Of course, when we learn from the child or the family or the police about such a case, we offer all possible help."

Horesh completely rules out the theory that is now making the rounds in the neighborhood, that the pedophiles influenced one another and that pedophilia was a kind of "fashion" in the neighborhood. "Pedophilia is not like youth suicide, when publicity is liable to turn it into a mode. Pedophilia is a very deep personality disorder and very difficult to treat. It is unreasonable to think someone will become a pedophile because he has been influenced by another pedophile, unless he himself has the personality background that fits the case."

Nor does Horesh believe that people in the neighborhood knew that children were readily available victims of pedophiles but preferred to turn a blind eye. "What is more reasonable is that each of them kept the secret to himself and told no one else. The children didn't tell the parents and the parents didn't tell the police or other parents. The result was a circle of silence, and that is exactly what makes it possible for the pedophile to act."

Horesh adds that she knows from the juvenile probation authorities that the three pedophiles were physically abusing children since their youth. All three went through the probation service but refused to receive treatment. "Unfortunately," she notes, "there is a law in this country stating that you cannot force treatment on sex offenders and rapists - which I believe is an outrageous state of affairs."

Does this neighborhood have any special traits that might account for the fact that it produced so many pedophiles? Ettie Boukai, head of the juvenile probation service in the Tel Aviv District, believes the concentration of pedophiles in a particular neighborhood is a chance event and that the same story could play itself out in a great many other places, too.

Miriam Faber, head of youth welfare services in Tel Aviv, says that mutual influence is possible among three pedophiles who grew up in the same neighborhood and are friends. "It's possible they boasted to one another and thus encouraged each other. That is something for the police to check."

In the past year, Faber has received about 3,000 reports of cases involving sexual attacks on children. "Let us assume that some of the reports are incorrect and let's say that only a thousand of the children were victims," she says. "We have to take into account that a great many of the victims are themselves liable to become sex offenders. It is very important to identify sex offenders early, and certainly also their victims. The trouble is that there are very few experts on the subject in Israel. Nevertheless, we are working with those experts to try to create a program for training social workers and therapists who will specialize in the area of sex crimes. So far, 60 people have taken the course, and 30 more will soon take it. I admit this is a far smaller number than what is needed, but it is all we can do."

The psychiatrist

This description irks Dr. Viki Levy, a psychiatrist who is an expert on sex crimes. "The fact that I and my colleague, Dr. Ruth Fliesshauer, are perhaps the only two experts in the country in the area of sex crimes should have set off every possible alarm bell," she says. "You were told that there aren't enough experts in Israel? Well, I happen to know a great many experts in this field in Western countries and in the United States, and I invited many of them to Israel to teach; the problem is that no one is actually interested in what they have to say. People in this country simply refuse to learn. It is inconceivable to find ignorance of this kind on such an important subject in any other Western country. So I don't think the point should be to blame the neighborhood, and the question is not whether the three men in question were friends and knew about each other's deeds. No, that is just something that the police have to look into.

"The point is that people understand nothing in this field, and I am talking about educated and respected people, such as judges and juvenile probation officers and the State Prosecutor's Office and teachers. But even though they have no understanding of the subject, they insist they know what they're doing and refuse to learn."

According to Levy, not only are the sentences meted out to pedophiles almost always too short ("It's impossible to even start treating a sex offender in a period of less than three years"), there is also no program to ease their way back into society after release and no proper supervision. "A pedophile must not be released unless there is a way to keep tabs on him," she says. "D. will now face trial for crimes he committed up to two years ago, but you can be sure that in the past two years he did not stop committing the same acts. That is the nature of sex offenses, as anyone can easily find out. But here, the judges aren't even willing to go into the Internet and find out what is considered basic knowledge in every Western country.

"For example, before an offender like this is released, I would want him to undergo a rehabilitation program and to wear electronic handcuffs so the police will be able to know when he wants to go to the park again. All kinds of prohibitions should be imposed on him. He should have to undergo polygraph [lie detector] tests regularly. Someone also has to make sure he doesn't turn up as a guard in some school or in a kindergarten."

Levy rejects the thesis that there is a connection between area of residence or socio-economic status and sex offenses. "Sex offenses cut across all classes and all population groups. It is possible that poor neighborhoods are more convenient for sex offenders to live in, because odd people are more easily integrated there." (Possibly this explains the frightening concentration of pedophiles in the neighborhood.) The education system in the neighborhood should have spotted the children's distress, Levy says, and parents who don't believe their children or don't allow them to complain to the police should be taken in for questioning on suspicion of abuse. "It is abuse and criminal negligence in regard to the most basic obligation of parents as parents. Unfortunately, however, this is a kind of neglect that is also not necessarily typical of low socio-economic population groups."

Ignorance of the subject prepares the ground for the growth of baseless myths, which are prevalent among people who deal with sex offenses without the proper training. "The myths that have to be shattered once and for all are that sex offenses are related to heightened sexual impulse. That is totally without foundation. We all have sexual urges but we all learn to control them, just as we learn to control our other bodily functions. What sex offenders need is someone to teach them that they have to learn to control their sexual urges.

"Another dangerous myth is the contention that everyone who has been the victim of sexual abuse will become a sex offender," Levy continues. "The majority of the victims will not become sex offenders. What is true is that most sex offenders have a background of being sexual victims. Another myth is that any treatment is better than no treatment: that is utter nonsense. There are a great many people who did not receive the proper training to treat sex offenders, but they take sex offenders for treatment and we are all at ease, including the offenders. They think they have got over the problem, and then, after having been supposedly treated, they go free and attack again. Take the case of Oren Danan: He said he thought he was better because he received treatment.

"Another myth is that this is a psychiatric problem that can be dealt with by means of medicines. We don't even have a psychiatric profile of sex offenders, so it is impossible to treat the problem solely with medicines. Chemical castration, which some genius always starts talking about in these cases, is no more than a tiny fraction of what should be a complete system of treatment. It will do no good at all without comprehensive treatment. Comprehensive treatment is very complex and protracted, and it has to teach the offender to revise his personal fantasies, and that takes time.

"These guys don't need chemical castration. They need someone to force them to stop doing what they are doing and lock them away for a long enough time so that it will be possible to treat them, and then when they are released, we have to see that they are monitored so it will not be possible for them to go back to doing the same things. But for all that to happen, we need judges and prosecutors and probation officers who will be willing to learn."

Thursday, July 18, 2002

Jewish-Survivors · Jewish Survivors of Trauma is dedicated to breaking the silence of abuse in the Jewish Community.

The original yahoo group for The Awareness Center was accidently deleted back in 2001.

The networking group was created to give Jewish survivors of sexual abuse/assault who were members of AOL's Jewish community on line a place to communicate with each other. At the time, Vicki Polin was a JCOMM (Jewish Community Leader online). The group was originally created back in 1997 and later merged with the newly created organization in 1999.

Not
exactly what the title or the subtitle says--but rather, with integrity
and even a certain elegance: Jewish prostitution and the Jewish fight
against it. Until the late 1800s, historian Bristow (Vice and Vigilance)
explains, strict religious prohibitions deterred prostitution and
procuring among Jews (though there were exceptions: Dickens modeled
Fagin after an actual brothelkeeper). The vice began to flourish after
1870, when the shtetl and the closely-knit Jewish family were disrupted
by pogroms, wars, rapid urbanization, and secularization, and when
immigration created an oversupply of single males in North and South
America and South Africa. A Jewish underworld--often organized along
family lines--materialized to supply women from Eastern Europe to every
other continent. The subculture of that demimonde, as Bristow
intriguingly describes it, was remarkably faithful to religious
traditions: brothel owners founded synagogues and cemeteries; pimps
ordered kosher meat; and girls in Butte, Montana refused to work on holy
days. Statistically, he demonstrates, Jews were no more involved in
prostitution than the French, Greeks, Poles, Chinese, or most other
groups; but anti-Semites inevitably exploited the issue, conjuring up
visions of an international conspiracy to abduct Christian girls and
spirit them off to the bordellos of Buenos Aires. (The majority of
prostitutes, in fact, were volunteers; and Jewish traffickers dealt
mostly with Jewish women.) To counter the bigotry and erase ""this
horrible blot on the reputation of our race,"" a coalition of Jewish
socialists, Zionists, social reformers, religious organizations,
feminists, and (more reluctantly) the orthodox community mounted an
anti-prostitution campaign, led and funded by Rothschilds, Montefiores,
and Bertha Pappenheim (Freud's ""Anna O.""). They resorted to ostracism,
vigilante action, police investigation, social work, travelers' aid,
muckraking journalism, problem plays on the Yiddish stage, and the
League of Nations: all with limited success. In America, Jewish
prostitution ended only when Jewish family life stabilized and economic
opportunities opened up after 1914; in Europe, the resolution was
provided by Hitler (who had heard about Jewish white-slavers). A deft,
scholarly excursion into the sociology of prostitution and the byways of
Jewish history.

This book recounts the events involving Raquel Liberman, an impoverished
immigrant to Argentina that was forced by circumstances into
prostitution, and the powerful Zwi Migdal, which controlled the
recruitment and deployment of Jewish prostitutes in Argentina while
maintaining mutually profitable relations with corrupt politicians and
policemen. Liberman's story is presented as an example of individual
courage and determination in the face of the violence and corruption of
the prostitution business. Her struggle with the Zwi Migdal and
triumphant public victory over her oppressors was widely publicized in
newspapers and magazines, and was a political cause celebre in its time.
This book gives readers an intimate view of how the affair caught the
public imagination, and was interpreted and transformed by the artistic
imagination.

Fear of Jewish white slavery, the sexual traffic in immigrant Jewish refugee women, often conducted by Jewish men, was a topic that preoccupied Jewish communities in Europe and immigrant communities in North and South America from the 1880s until the outbreak of World War II. Of all Latin American cities, Buenos Aires, Argentina, was cited as a haven for white slavers because it had a system of municipally regulated prostitution from 1875 until 1936, when a national law, the Law of Social Prophylaxis, outlawed brothels throughout Argentina.

Jewish women emigrated to Argentina from Poland, Russia and Germany in an attempt to escape poverty and religious persecution. Pressed into prostitution by inflexible religious laws such as those regarding agunot (anchored wives unable to obtain a divorce), the economic desperation of entire families, and the belief that wives, even those married under false pretenses to pimps, should obey their husband, they were among the groups of immigrant women most at risk in Buenos Aires.

As immigrants in a predominantly Catholic society, the Jewish community in Argentina—the largest in South America—became very concerned about reports of Jewish criminality in any form. The claims of white slavery, Jewish pimps, and Jewish prostitutes shook the community to its very core, and every attempt was made to separate the Jewish criminal element from the larger community, including banning them from synagogues in Buenos Aires. In 1908 the Jewish community held a public meeting to discuss the implications of street protests in Jewish neighborhoods against pimps and their relatives. Among the people invited to attend was the first Socialist elected to the national legislature, Alfredo Palacios (1880–1965), who in 1913 drafted legislation to deport foreign pimps, and Manuel Gálvez (1882–1962), a Catholic conservative who had recently written a thesis on the white slave trade. According to Gálvez’s memoirs, pimps paid the crowd to disrupt the meeting with insults in Yiddish and by throwing objects at the committee organized to discuss the subject (Gálvez, 1905 and 1961).

In 1913, Samuel Cohen, Secretary of the London-based Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, went to South America to ascertain the plight of Jewish women and their victimization. Although he also visited Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Santos (all Brazilian cities), as well as Montevideo, Uruguay, he devoted most of his journey and comments to Buenos Aires. Wherever he stopped in South America there were Jewish women in brothels, many of whom spoke Yiddish, and most of whom were Russian or Polish (Cohen 1913, 1–10).

In Buenos Aires he learned that no anti-white slavery groups were allowed to board vessels to help women arriving from Europe seek work. He did note that an Argentine Anti-White Slavery society had already been established and that the local Immigrant Hotel did its best to find both men and women decent employment. According to the people he interviewed, the moral conditions in Buenos Aires had improved considerably from earlier years. “Immorality is still bad, but it is not so flagrant, nor is it so much countenanced as it was formerly.” Indeed many Argentines had come to support European views that female white slavery should not be tolerated, and anti-white slavery laws had been passed.

Nevertheless, Cohen blamed the existence of legal houses of prostitution in the capital for the continued problem of immorality. As he put it, “I have talked to the ‘Madames,’ and the only conclusion that I can come to is that they [the brothels] are dens of iniquity, and ought to be closed as quickly as possible” (Cohen, 14–16).

While over thirty-five thousand Jewish emigrants had arrived since 1908, according to the calculations of the Jewish community, more Jews had arrived earlier and continued to pour into Buenos Aires. Among the few people Cohen found interested in the problem of Jewish white slaves was Rabbi Samuel Halphon of the Libertad Street synagogue, and Madame Francesca de Krämer of the Sociedad de Beneficencia de Damas Israelitas, who expanded their work with poor Jewish women to help women in danger of becoming prostitutes (Cohen, 27–29).

As part of his visit to Buenos Aires, Cohen went to brothels operated by Jewish women (Cohen, 30).

It is with shame that I have to say that many Jewish women, themselves mothers of families, are amongst those who are running the houses. They were not pleased with my visit. They did not like the questions that I asked them or the arguments that I put forward against the continuation of their ‘trade.’

…. They were ashamed, too, that a Jew was taking up the enquiry against them.

Samuel Cohen was not the first observer to criticize the plight of Jewish women who engaged in prostitution in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Argentina. Almost as soon as the municipality of Buenos Aires passed an 1875 ordinance regulating brothels as part of a public health campaign to prevent venereal diseases, reports of Jewish white slavery were published in European and Argentine newspapers. In March 1875 the local paper La Nación reported that a French court had condemned a man and woman to jail terms for trafficking in women, and soon reports of Jewish prostitution as well as Jewish pimps emerged (Bristow 1982, 113). In March 1907, two Russian Jews, Louis Gold and Harry Cohen, were “charged with procuring Jane Goldbloom and another young woman to lead an immoral life” in London because Gold had received word from Buenos Aires that attractive young girls were worth £100. This was one of several cases discovered by British police (Vigilance Record).

In 1910, the First Jewish International Conference on White Slavery released another report. It stated that in 1903 Buenos Aires “had forty-two known houses of which thirty-nine were owned by Russian Jews. …Of eight hundred new prostitutes registering in 1909, 236 were Jewish, of whom 213 were Russian” (Kaplan 1979, 111).

How did all these observers identify the Jewish prostitutes when there were no statistics of religious beliefs? When women registered to enter licensed houses of prostitution, they were asked about their nationality, among other things. Those women who identified themselves as Russian, Polish, or German, were assumed to be Jewish not only by the Jewish community, but also by representatives of those countries. The women found work in brothels through the efforts of Jewish pimps who began to organize in the late nineteenth century and had enough capital to set up the houses of prostitution and pay for a Madame to operate them. The existence of organizations such as the El Club de los 40, Varsovia, Asquenasum and later the Zwi Migdal, coupled with the ease with which moral reformers could obtain nationality statistics for legal prostitutes, made Jewish prostitution very visible, even though the much larger community of clandestine prostitutes were of Spanish, Italian and Argentine nationality.

The traffic in Jewish white slavery continued until the outbreak of World War I, and resurged after World War II. In the 1920s the investigations of the League of Nations, particularly its 1927 Report of the Special Body of Experts on Traffic in Women and Children, once again highlighted the visibility of Jewish prostitutes and traffickers. The following year one of the journalists involved in the League of Nations investigation, Albert Londres (1884–1932), published a study entitled Le Chemin au Buenos Ayres (The Road to Buenos Ayres). One of the English versions had a dust jacket with a provocative picture of two white women chained to each other. This chauvinistic and anti-Semitic book described French pimps in Buenos Aires as patriots who saved women from a life of lesbianism and cocaine, but had only negative comments about the Jewish pimps (League of Nations, 1927; Londres 1928).

The plight of two Jewish women caught up in white slavery led to the final political campaign to ban municipally regulated houses of prostitution in Buenos Aires. In 1930 Cosía Zeilón described how she had been forced by the famous Jewish madame Emma “The Millionaire “and the pimp Luis Migdal to engage in prostitution. That same year, Raquel Liberman accused the Zwi Migdal organization and her husband of forcing her back into prostitution years after she had used her savings to open an antique store. These revelations led to massive arrests of pimps who belonged to the Zwi Migdal, as well as a new decree to ban brothels in Buenos Aires after December 31, 1934. In December 1936 a national Law of Social Prophylaxis prohibited all municipalities from operating brothels and mandated prenuptial medical examinations for all men. While prostitution was not a crime, hereafter the police determined when prostitutes would be arrested.

World War II did more to end the traffic in Jewish prostitutes in Argentina than any local legislation. Women who escaped to Argentina and later from prostitution married into the Jewish community and subsequently led normal lives.

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Survivors ARE Heroes!

The Awareness Center believes ALL survivors of sex crimes should be given yellow ribbons to wear proudly.

Survivors of sexual violence (as adults and/or as a child) are just as deserving of a yellow ribbon as the men and women of our armed forces, who have been held captive as hostages or prisoners of war.

Survivors of sexual violence have been forced to learn how to survive, being held captive not by foreigners, but mostly by their own family members, teachers, camp counselors, coaches babysitters, rabbis, cantors or other trusted authority figures.

For these reasons ALL survivors of sexual violence should be seen as heroes!